– Coinffeine launches today the worlds first decentralized Bitcoin exchange platform in more than 70 countries including Russia, China, Indonesia and Brazil.

– From day one, and only two months after the release of the Technical Preview version, Coinffeine achieves the largest international expansion ever carried out by a Bitcoin company.

– In November 2014, the company became the worlds first Bitcoin startup in having financial support of a large banking partner, the Spanish bank Bankinter.

Coinffeine has launched today the first decentralized Bitcoin exchange platform in more than 70 countries, among which are SEPA members, Russia, China, Indonesia and Brazil. Coinffeine achieves the greatest international expansion from day one ever carried out by a Bitcoin company.

Two months after the release of the Technical Preview version, where users have been able to experiment with the platform, Coinffeine now allows the exchange of bitcoins and FIAT money in a P2P way and in a global market.

Coinffeine offers a user experience similar to traditional exchanges, but using local payment processors – such as PayPal- to manage FIAT money and a desktop application to allow users to manage their own bitcoins without having to lose control over them at any time.

Coinffeine takes advantage of the P2P model to avoid accepting deposits in bitcoins or FIAT money, making it unnecessary to identify users or fulfill costly money laundering laws in each country.

“Not having to identify users or enforce KYC laws has allowed us to design a much more scalable exchange model. But what is even more interesting, is the user experience we offer. Coinffeine is like BitTorrent. You just download it, you connect your OKPAY account, or PayPal in the future, and use it”, said Alberto Gómez Toribio, CEO of the company.

Coinffeine success is in large part due to the support from solid partners such as Bankinter bank and the law firm Abanlex. The latter is known for winning the “Right to be forgotten” lawsuit against Google in Europe, and supports Coinffeine’s legal strategy in this world-wide launch.

Who is Coinffeine for?

“We want our customers to be those who simply have a PayPal like account and want to buy or sell bitcoins in a simple and effective way”, said Gómez.

For the moment Coinffeine only supports Okpay, a russian-based payment processor popular in the Bitcoin community and with 20% of its users in China. But Coinffeine expects to integrate other payment processors like PayPal or Alipay to expand services to the rest of the world in the near future.

The user experience that Coinffeine provides is very different from other P2P exchanges such as LocalBitcoins, and is closer to the experience of Coinbase or BitStamp.

“To use Coinffeine is as simple as using LocalBitcoins, but as powerful as using Coinbase or BitStamp”, said Gómez.

Coinffeine integrates the concept of a wallet and exchange in the same product, offering the first Bitcoin desktop wallet that includes the ability to buy or sell bitcoins automatically.

Limitations of the Beta version of Coinffeine

Coinffeine is still in Beta, so we recommend using moderate amounts of money.

Users of the Beta version could experience some limitations of liquidity available in the market. Coinffeine is negotiating with specialized companies to close liquidity deals and market surveillance to be added in future releases.

The P2P nature of Bitcoin is changing the way users operate on the Internet and it is allowing the creation of more scalable businesses. However, few people can benefit today from P2P services to buy or sell bitcoins globally, in real time and with an automatic experience without resorting to forums as LocalBitcoins.

In many cases, the lack of P2P models limits users to perform operations on traditional exchanges, accepting costly validation processes due to AML legislations in each country. But even more unfortunate is that these services are available only in a few countries in the world, and excludes many of the markets with the greatest potential. This is because it is expensive for a traditional exchange to move into new markets, and because in many markets such as China, it is simply impossible. In most places in the world Bitcoin exchanges doesn´t exist beyond rudimentary forums that connect users through web pages. We intend to change this scenario, creating a global exchange with a model which, taking advantage of the P2P model, allows us to take our product to the whole world in an easy way.

The experience from an early user

For now, only a privileged few are those who have had the opportunity to test the Coinffeine Beta version with real money that Coinffeine plans to launch in the coming days. One of these users is Jorge Ordovás, Director of Innovation in Payment Systems in the business school in the Foro de Economía Digital and possibly one of the most experienced people in Spain in new means of payment such as Bitcoin. Jorge is one of the early users of the Coinffeine Beta version, and we wanted to talk to him about his experience with the application in the early trading with real money.

“To use Coinffeine has been a groundbreaking experience and a qualitative leap that allowed me, for the first time, to buy and sell bitcoins in real time without forcing me to take a “leap of faith” entrusting third parties to control my virtual coins”, says Jorge, and continues that “for several years I have been a customer of multiple exchanges, which allowed me to have a very broad view of the complexity, limitations and risks involved in buying and selling virtual currencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Nextcoin, Dogecoin …), due to the paradox of having to rely on third parties in an ecosystem that is essentially based on decentralization. And I’ve been in situations like the bankruptcy of MtGox, or thefts in Bter and Bitstamp, among others”.

Jorge has followed the evolution of Coinffeine closely and is one of the users who have tried all the versions of the application this far. At first he could experiment with the different versions of the Trial and the Technical Preview which, for security reasons, only allowed operations with no real money. Jorge has been testing our application with real money for several days, making operations and recording in the blockchain the first P2P exchange operations.

“The evolution of Coinffeine has been spectacular in many ways. The performance has improved considerably, as well as ease for installation and configuration, and many aspects of overall performance has been further refined”, Jorge explains about the work behind the user interface, “but where it really has been a before and after is in the complete redesign of the user interface, changing from an environment very oriented to the technical level of the solution to a much more attractive, intuitive and simple application aimed at the end user, which also includes custom functions for users of exchanges (as orders at market price)“, he adds.

The technical aspects that enable real bitcoins exchanges involves a change in the user experience of the application and Jorge says he has noticed “a difference in higher processing times, which is actually a feature of the real Bitcoin network against the testnet, which also affects the use of traditional exchanges”, he explains before concluding that, from his point of view “the experience is still much more satisfactory in general terms than these alternatives. The feeling of simplicity and the control over your bitcoins are stronger than these details”.

The blockchain’s block 360649 registered the first transaction carried out by two Coinffeine users with real money. Since last June 12th, a small group of users is testing the Beta version of Coinffeine, as prior step to its impending public release.

The transaction of 0.0549 BTC, verified at 21:47:13 last June 12th of 2015 recorded a Smart Contract between two users that has been created following the Coinffeine Protocol and it had enabled both parties to exchange fiat money by bitcoins in a decentralized manner.

For several weeks the Coinffeine’s development team will work closely with this small group of users to ensure that everything is ready for the Beta public release, in which users who choose so, will be able to start exchanging bitcoins and fiat money in a distributed and automatic way.

Coinffeine will operate in China and 69 more countries from day one

On the eve of the launch of the Beta version, we are pleased to announce that Coinffeine will be available from the first day in more than 70 countries. This is possible because Coinffeine uses local payment processors -companies as OKPay– to manage the fiat money, and the users will manage the bitcoins using the desktop application as a wallet. Coinffeine doesn’t require identification of the users, or to do a complex legal feasibility study for each of the countries where it will be operating, as our company does not manage money deposits or customer’s bitcoins.

The Coinffeine launch strategy aims to position our product in markets such as China, one of the countries where we will have presence from the day one, where traditional exchanges such as Coinbase or BitStamp cannot easily operate.

China proved to be one of the most active markets in late 2013, before the authorities banned the operations of Bitcoin exchange companies. Since then, Chinese authorities allow individuals to possess and exchange bitcoins particularly, but the operations of companies managing deposits of bitcoins (exchanges) are not allowed.

However, Coinffeine doesn’t accept bitcoin or fiat currency deposits and, even though the user experience is the same as with a traditional exchange, the exchanges are made P2P -among users- what it makes our product to fit perfectly into the Chinese market.

The data also shows that 20% of OkPay users come from China, so to try to differentiate ourselves in a market with almost no competition seems a good opportunity.

A replicable and scalable model

Being able to launch our product in more than 70 countries right from the start, simply is just aproof of the scalability of a model like Coinffeine.

Although we decided to start with those markets where there is a high potential and less competition, Coinffeine plans to integrate other payment processors like Dwolla or even PayPal at a very low development cost. Very soon we will be present in many more markets.

We are a start-up that wants to build a business model that is replicable and scalable. In Coinffeine we believe that taking advantage of P2P and decentralized technologies, such as Bitcoin, is the most natural way to achieve that.